How can history, memory, and cultural knowledge become the materials of sculpture? In Brian Dettmer’s hands, books that have lost their original function do just that. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference volumes represent the physicality of gathered knowledge with their moving pages, solid bindings, and words and illustrations.
Taryn Simon: The Spectacle of Loss
In the fall of 2016, Taryn Simon presented a unique interactive work, An Occupation of Loss, at the Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with Artangel, London. (Loss, in the work’s title, represents the fugitive nature of things, a theme that runs through all of Simon’s work.)
Lynda Benglis: I Choose My Dreams
Lynda Benglis was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Over the course of her long career, Lynda Benglis has defied easy categorization.
Renee Stout: Formal Divination
The quiet nuances on the surface of Renee Stout’s work are just the tip of the iceberg, though the subterranean rumblings may be hard to decipher without a fundamental knowledge of Yoruba, Vodoun, and Hoodoo culture.
Iakovos Volkov: In Forgotten Places
On the edges of the Greek urban landscape, in neglected and abandoned buildings, Iakovos Volkov composes eloquent, cerebral sculptures. Made of discarded materials that he finds and reimagines, his works give meaning to spaces that have lost relevance, environments scarred by a lacerated economy.
Sinister Beauty: A Conversation with Gabriel Valansi
Though Gabriel Valansi is internationally known as a photographer, it’s hard to define him as such. The monumental scale of his work, its nontraditional approach to installation, and the interaction between different elements far exceed the limits of photography, generating an a priori spatial disposition more akin to sculpture.
Sam Jaffe: Interdisciplinary Opportunism
Sam Jaffe constructs uncompromising sculptures from yarn and fabric, giving form to soft materials, often by knitting or sewing. These works are bold efforts, enhanced by an authoritative use of color, with a defined point of view.
Konstantinos Stamatiou: In Praise of Junk
Greek-born sculptor Konstantinos Stamatiou, who divides his time between Athens and New York, works with throwaway materials such as plastic, Styrofoam, and cut drinking straws, following the path established by Arte Povera, in which a “poor art” is constructed of humble elements (Jannis Kounellis, a sculptor of Greek origin, is an important practitioner of Arte
Fighting Gravity: A Conversation with Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Tony Cragg’s new works – contortions of wood, metal, and stone perfectly manipulated by man and machine – represent a kind of beauty as close to nature and as far removed from Modernist
Diane Simpson: Fashioning
Clothes are the skin over the skin of the body. Although one is manufactured and the other biological, both are theorized constructions. Objectively speaking, the body is a succession of stacked parts that vary conceptually in terms of emotive emphasis: head, neck, torso, hips, genitals, legs, feet.
